Museum Revolutions How museums change and are changed [Paperback]

This single-volume museum studies reference title explores the ways in which museums are shaped and configured and how they themselves attempt to shape and change the world around them.

Written by a leading group of museum professionals and academics from around the world and including new research, the chapters reveal the diverse and subtle means by which museums engage and in so doing change and are changed. The authors span over 200 years discussing national museums, ecomuseums, society museums, provincial galleries, colonial museums, the showmans museum, and science centres. Topics covered include: disciplinary practices, ethnic representation, postcolonial politics, economic aspiration, social reform, indigenous models, conceptions of history, urban regeneration, sustainability, sacred objects, a sense of place, globalization, identities, social responsibility, controversy, repatriation, human remains, drama, learning and education.

Capturing the richness of the museum studies discipline, Museum Revolutions is the ideal text for museum studies courses, providing a wide range of interlinked themes and the latest thought and research from experts in the field. It is invaluable for those students and museum professionals who want to understand the past, present and future of the museum.

Introduction: Simon Knell Shaping museums and manifestos1 Establishing the paradigmatic museum: Georges Cuviers Cabinet danatomie compar?e in Paris Philippe Taquet 2 William Bullock: inventing a visual language of objects Susan Pearce 3 Museums, fossils and the cultural revolution of science: mapping change in the politics of knowledge in early nineteenth-century Britain Simon J. Knell 4 Establishing the manifesto: art histories in the nineteenth-century museum Christopher Whitehead 5 Economic logic versus Enlightenment rationality: evolution of the museum-zoo-garden complex and the modern Indian cilc…